Challenges distinctions between race and ethnicity in Latinx culture, and argues that the racialization of Latinx (a gender non-binary way of referring to 'Latina/o') language requires a careful consideration of race

Advances a critique of the U.S. as a fundamentally racist society built on histories of settler colonialism and enslavement, and approaches institutions such as public schools as central sites in which white supremacy is enacted and reproduced

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

Jonathan Rosa

Description

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race examines the emergence of linguistic and ethnoracial categories in the context of Latinidad. The book draws from more than twenty-four months of ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork in a Chicago public school, whose student body is more than 90% Mexican and Puerto Rica, to analyze the racialization of language and its relationship to issues of power and national identity. It focuses specifically on youth socialization to U.S. Latinidad as a contemporary site of political anxiety, raciolinguistic transformation, and urban inequity. Jonathan Rosa's account studies the fashioning of Latinidad in Chicago's highly segregated Near Northwest Side; he links public discourse concerning the rising prominence of U.S. Latinidad to the institutional management and experience of raciolinguistic identities there. Anxieties surrounding Latinx identities push administrators to transform 'at risk' Mexican and Puerto Rican students into 'young Latino professionals.' This institutional effort, which requires students to learn to be and, importantly, soundlike themselves in highly studied ways, reveals administrators' attempts to navigate a precarious urban terrain in a city grappling with some of the nation's highest youth homicide, dropout, and teen pregnancy rates. Rosa explores the ingenuity of his research participants' responses to these forms of marginalization through the contestation of political, ethnoracial, and linguistic borders.

Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race

Jonathan Rosa

Author Information

Jonathan Rosa is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics, at Stanford University. His research analyzes the interplay between racial marginalization, linguistic stigmatization, and educational inequity. Rosa's work has appeared in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, and the Journal ofLinguistic Anthropology, as well as media outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, CNN, and Univision.